


Dandelion Wishes

by TabithaJean



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Baby William, Not Jackson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:07:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25465222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TabithaJean/pseuds/TabithaJean
Summary: Mulder considers his position in life after William is born, and how he feels about it all. He weighs up whether leaving Scully and William is better than staying.I had this quote from The Hours running through my head as I wrote it:'(Staying) was death. I chose life.'
Relationships: Fox Mulder & William | Jackson Van De Kamp, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Kudos: 21





	Dandelion Wishes

It’s not that everything is different. It’s that everything is just similar enough for him to forget, in the banality of the supermarket, or whilst caught in a hug, only for the realisation to knock him completely off balance. The world tilts with such regularity that he’s concerned whenever his light nausea takes a brief hiatus. He is a time traveller caught between two worlds, and if he still had the X-Files, if he still had a job, he would attempt a joke about it to see if it was just lame enough to make the corners of her mouth twitch.

In the absence of time travel, he occupies a sentry position on her bed. He sits over the covers waiting for the sun’s rays to creep through her blinds like the legs of a spider. Scully sleeps beside him, her hand on the bassinet, which is no accident: she wakes intermittently to place her hand on the baby’s chest, feeling it rise and fall with the quick desperation of the exceptionally young to keep living.

The lights have stayed on since the baby arrived. A running t-shirt over the bedside lamp throws an eerie glow reminiscent of a den made of bile, or of waxy caves containing secrets which can bend the very laws of nature. He hasn’t thought about the Kindred in eight years, but now he understands what it’s like to be reborn, to move through the world with fresh skin, fresh perspective, fresh life, only to find that the vacuum he’d left behind has been filled with other things.

The night used to be his time to fall down a rabbit hole of research or to numb himself via vintage sports games. Now it stretches ahead like a highway, shimmering with his exhaustion, but he can’t risk closing his eyes in case he finds he’s jumped time again. He misses Scully’s pregnancy snores: her thick grunts would crescendo and retreat like the tide. Without them, he attaches himself to William and Scully as they sleep. He is the unknown entity in their equation, the algebraic X. 

Mulder hears the shuffling like a little piggy in its pen and prepares to rise. A thin cry pierces the quiet room, gaining quick momentum. The baby is twelve days old and so indignant in his right to food. His voice is a flare in the dark night of a shipwreck. Mulder lifts the baby while Scully stirs, hoisting herself up delicately. Baby William, named after his father. Or named after her father? He’s not sure why Scully would name their child after his father, who stalked the periphery of a room with blank, shark eyes, his slack mouth full of cigarettes and scotch. A shadow of the Captain who instilled in his children both strength and pride enough to follow their passions.

William’s eyes are closed and he wriggles in Mulder’s grip, brows furrowed in disgust. Mulder’s hands seem too big to hold him safely. He is arrested by the child’s angry, red face and sucks air through his teeth as he suddenly remembers that this baby is _his son._ His heart swells but his eyes stay dry. The sins of the fathers run through William’s tiny veins: a cocktail of deceit, adultery, blood money, quiet repression and loud rage courses through him. William cries in rebellion, trying to exorcise himself from the weight on his tiny shoulders, and Mulder runs his thumbs over William’s ribcage, feeling little matchsticks bones. The walls of the room are too close. He blinks: scene change. The baby is just hungry. That’s all these cries are.

‘Mulder,’ Scully is grumpy, impatient. ‘Can you hand him to me please?’

Their heads bump as he helps her guide William’s mouth to her breast. All the education between them, their profiler skills, problem solving skills, all the knowledge which has developed over the years like tree branches, sprouting new leaves haphazardly - none of it helps when they need to get their son to eat. Scully inhales sharply as William latches, fusing himself to her.

‘You ok?’ Mulder asks, concerned that the baby is hurting her. She nods slowly, glancing up with a quick smile as pride and relief flicker across her face.

‘Yeah. I think he’s got it.’ She closes her eyes and settles against the pillows. William’s little suckling noises are the pappus of a dandelion seed floating away, carrying their wishes. They kiss Mulder’s ears. He watches Scully in wonder; she is photosynthesis. He has dirt in his lungs and maggots in his intestines. _Drink_ , he thinks to his son, _grow._

*

They’d fought earlier that evening. Or rather, he made her cry. She cries a lot at the moment, claiming it’s hormonal, something to do with her milk, but Mulder sees how her shoulders freeze every time there’s a knock at the door and suspects it runs deeper. Rather than returning home after his basketball and beer, he found himself driving out to the conservation area, away from the streetlights, away from people, away, away, away.

‘Where on _earth_ have you been?’ She’d asked, eyes flashing with tears as relief flamed into fury. She had crossed the room as quickly as her recovery allowed. The force of her hug squeezed the air out of him, and his shoulders dropped as responsibility settled across them once more. ‘You can’t do that to me! You can’t just disappear for hours like that!’

How could he tell her? How could he tell her that she hadn’t even crossed his mind as he passed the Georgetown exit? That the trees bowing over the roads in the middle of nowhere felt like arms over his head, shielding him from the vast, clear, threatening sky?

‘I thought…. I thought…’ she’d snuffled against him, her fingers gripping the back of his sweater as she gasped herself back into composure.

‘Shhh, it’s alright,’ he soothed, tracing patterns on her back. They swayed together, the parental urge to soothe through rhythm already so instinctive. They circled the hardwood floor where Missy had taken her last breath.

He couldn’t tell her the ecstasy of that first, bitter sip of beer, or how the ball had felt like fire and he like liquid as they flew around the court together. Or that he noted where the fire doors were in the bar, choosing a table close to the main entrance in case he needed to escape. He had laughed when Theo joked that Mulder had returned from the dead with improved field goal skills. It crashed out of him like an avalanche, and a months-old weight lifted off his chest. It felt _good_ to make light of it, rather than wrap it up into a ball of hushed fear, like he did when he was with her, which they tucked away and never looked at directly.

Theo remembered keenly the early days of parenthood, and Mulder proudly shared how well Scully had taken to it. That her fears of being too pragmatic in her approach were completely unfounded; that she leans into her instincts with every choice.

‘You wouldn’t change it though, would you?’ Theo had asked. ‘Even when you don’t know your ass from your elbow, you wouldn’t change a thing.’ And with the flick of a switch, Mulder’s nausea returned. He didn’t want to think of William anymore, or acknowledge that his answer to Theo’s question was yes. Yes, he would change it. He would change almost every part of it. He would change how easy it seemed for Scully to disregard the burden that William carries in his blood line, and he would change his own inability to focus on anything else. This isn’t a normal reaction to the birth of his child. He blocked out his friend’s voice and focussed on the neck of his beer bottle until his vision stopped swimming. Then he had stood up and left.

*

Scully is asleep holding the baby. In spite of everything they have been through, Scully always succumbs to sleep when it calls for her. He loves it. She sleeps deeply and easily, as if she’s replenishing the shards of life which have been stolen from her by men in masks and malignant tumours.

He takes a stuttered breath as he looks at her with William. There is something about her raised slouch which reminds him of a particular Sunday morning. One of the early ones, maybe her first or second night at his. He’d found her in bed with a newspaper spread out on top of a towel.

‘What’s with the towel?’ He asked her, delighted that he could return home from a coffee run to find her half-dressed and tousle-haired, with her toes making tiny peaks under his covers.

‘These are your sheets.’

‘So?’ He passed her a coffee, which she set on the bedside table to cool. ‘Do you do this at home?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘But these are _your_ sheets.’

‘Scully, I can’t even begin to tell you how _little_ I care about bedsheets… Besides, do they look like the kind of sheets that would mind being inked on?’ He teased. She hugged her knees and looked at him with wide-eyed surprise as if he’d missed the secret. He couldn’t believe this moment was real.

‘Well I don’t know, Mulder,’ she replied slowly, with the faintest arch in her eyebrow. ‘I guess we could find out.’

Heat spread down his torso as she slowly undid the buttons on her pyjama top. He kissed her, taking time to work his way down from her delicate neck, finally arriving at the recently discovered freckles on her inner thighs. It was still early enough that they were quiet, almost polite with each other, as they came. Early enough that the details had stayed crisp.

Afterwards, he spotted a smudge of newsprint on her ass as she sashayed into the bathroom. The sight of that smudge against her skin ignited fireworks in his chest.

Scully twitches and loosens her grasp on William. Sleeping with the baby terrifies her, so Mulder lifts the baby for a cuddle. William’s little mouth is ajar, a trickle of milk running down to his neck; his weight is a touchstone in the present. Mulder runs his lips over his son’s bald, velvet head, and the baby’s warmth spreads through him, seeking out the parts which haven’t yet thawed from his time underground. He stays doubled over his child, inhaling him, trying to stitch himself to William as Scully does so easily. He wants to be indispensable.

The gentle sway of William’s lips reminds Mulder of a line from Plath: ‘all night your moth-breath/flickers among the pink roses.’ William has nibbled moth-holes in the fabric between him and Scully. There are holes in Scully that only the baby can fill. She watches William with hooded eyes. He is her fifth limb. They regard each other through the veil of parenthood now: even when he’s asleep, William sits between them. Scully wraps the trauma of his birth around her like a shawl; he watches her fold in on herself. 

_The truth we both know_ Scully had said to him only nine days earlier in this very room. He laughs quietly, but it sounds like a wheezing bark from an old dog. What truth does he know? He, who has already crossed over and found nothing but a black hole? Doubting Thomas was told ‘blessed are they who have not seen yet still believe.’Doubting Mulder slips his little finger into William’s hand and whispers, ‘But that’s no good, little buddy, because what do you do when you’ve seen it and all you learn is how empty it is?’ William grips his finger.

The word consent returns to him over and over again in an unbidden mantra. Mulder didn’t consent to his abduction, nor to the reassignment of the work he’d established over the majority of his career. To being tested on, to being buried, to being brought back to life. The only thing he consented to was loving Scully. And in continuing to love her, did he also consent to William? The swell of her belly when he woke up bruised his heart. The memory burns because he loves his son. He was a participant in IVF, a process which Scully owned, but William is a shared responsibility, a shared joy and a shared fear. He didn’t see Scully’s middle thicken, wasn’t there to sing lullabies to her skin as his son knitted himself together below. He was dropped back in the middle of a path that had already been navigated. His first minutes upon waking are always spent in September 2000, when he and Scully were reaching out toward love, trying to unravel its clues together. Then with a cry from his son - whose head is too big for his body, his little alien child - Mulder snaps back into the present. This is how it is now. He forgets his son and then remembers. The guilt he carries is his albatross.

‘I wonder if you’re safe here,’ Scully had mumbled against his chest that evening. ‘I wonder if they won’t come looking for you.’ Mulder’s stomach had curdled at her words, and with a clenched jaw, he had buried his nose in her hair to find the place where they’d been happy together. The idea of being taken again was intolerable. He stared at her wall calendar which confirmed to him, yet again, that it is May 2001.

He puts William gently back into his bassinet. For the last three months he’s been trying to carve out his own space in this brave new world, but it’s now filling up with quicksand and he can’t keep his head above the surface. He sits beside Scully, who jolts awake with the weight of him, her eyes wide with panic. He grasps her hand as it flies immediately toward the bassinet and kisses it. There’s a sense of urgency; this is the moment when the quicksand either buries him, or he lunges out towards one final shot at life.

‘Scully,’ he murmurs as she catches her breath. ‘I’m going to go see Kersh tomorrow.’

‘Kersh?’ Her voice is thick and low with sleep, her eyelids heavy. Her free hand searches until it settles on William’s chest. ‘What for?’

‘To learn more about this investigation.’ He leans forward to kiss her forehead. She smells slightly stale, with shades of milk and sweat. He thinks of the farm his grandparents owned; of the cold, dewy mornings milking the cows with his grandmother before dawn. He thinks of pancakes and syrup after a run on a Saturday morning with his new girlfriend. She is lighter than his work partner; she loves fresh flowers and is powerless before European cheese. ‘You’re right. We need to know if there’s a threat.’

‘Mulder,’ she starts. Her eyes sharpen and her brows knit together, a copy of William when he’s fussing for food. ‘What if he says yes? What if he confirms it?’

‘Then we need to act appropriately.’

‘No. _No,_ ’ she says firmly. Mulder wipes a tear from her cheek. Twice in one night: a new record for him. She winces as she pushes herself to sit up straighter. ‘I just got you back. You just came back.’

‘You said it yourself, Scully. They might come for me. Here. Where you and William are. We should take every precaution.’ _Please don’t let them find me. Please don’t make me stay._ ‘You know I’m right.’

Her mouth tightens. She inhales deeply through her nose and her hot gaze scalds him. 

‘Is this about William?’ she asks shakily. ‘I know it’s been a difficult adjustment. You missed a lot, and now he’s here and I –‘

‘It’s not about William.’ He kisses her hand again, but the lie sits in his eyes so he still can’t look at her. ‘Not directly. I just want to make sure that you’re safe, that you don’t have to worry anymore. You’ve been through enough.’

‘Mulder…. We can’t go with you.’

‘No one’s said anything about leaving, Scully.’

‘I know you, Mulder. When have you ever just accepted defeat?’ She works so hard to keep her voice level. She thinks he can’t see the fear bleeding out of her. He sees it because it bleeds from him too. They are Deimos and Phobos. ‘You must be safe; God knows we need you to be safe. But tomorrow morning if Kersh confirms our worst fears, then I know you’ll chose to continue the fight. And that means removing yourself from the situation so you can work out your next move. It’s what you’ve done before. Scott Ostlehoff.’

Mulder’s cheeks tingle where the six wounds had festered. His teeth grind, and his throat is tight. He can’t deny her claims. If there’s a threat out there, he will track it down and destroy it. If there’s another piece to the puzzle, he’ll find it and lock it in place. And if it means leaving Scully and William, then he feels it may be for the best, in spite of how much it already hurts. He can’t father this child the way he deserves. He doesn’t want to skulk in the corners of William’s life. This choice, now, will save him in the long run. It will save all of them. Scully waits.

‘You may be right,’ he says quietly, finally looking up to see her eyes hurl accusations at him through unshed tears. She blinks and presses her fingers to her lips. She gulps a breath in and holds it while her eyes clench shut, beating down the cry. His desire to reach out to her and take it all back is stopped only by his fear that he’s not safe anymore. ‘I’m so sorry Scully. I hope it doesn’t have to be that way.’

‘It doesn’t,’ she says tightly. Her eyes are steady when she opens them again. ‘I need you.’

Her words chime clear like a bell. She won’t ask him to stay. He will choose to leave, and she won’t give her blessing. He will replay this moment over and over in the months to come, wondering if there could have been another outcome, but right now all he knows is that to act on Kersh’s input tomorrow is to choose a life that is more authentically his than the one in which he currently finds himself.

Silence drapes itself over them both, growing thick and oppressive. He rubs her hand with his thumb, focussing on the back and forth motion, while she stares out of the window, occasionally wiping her eyes with her other hand.

‘I need to go to sleep,’ she says finally, with resignation. ‘William will be awake in an hour or so for his next feed. Why don’t you take the couch, so we don’t disturb you?’

The finality of the closing door between them seals his choice. He reclines on her couch, such a contrast to her soft queen size bed, and his shoulders relax against the rigidity. His breathing quickens as he remembers the exact moment that the penny dropped for Scully, but his nausea has settled. He coughs back sobs as the weight of the conversation settles around him; as if William’s pappus breaths had granted his wishes and they land around him now like bricks falling into water.

In the morning he hears William cry. Pins and needles shoot his feet so violently that he can’t rise to reach him.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wondered how Mulder could get to a place where leaving is better than staying. And then I realised nothing about s8 is good for him, and that he would probably have very complicated feelings towards fatherhood, Scully, and he's very disempowered by the s8 finale. I still think he should have stayed. But I have sympathy for him too....
> 
> Thank you for any comments, they are really, really appreciated :)


End file.
